Hello dear Brainiacs! Long time, no see! It's been more than 4 months since I updated this site for the last time. Times were busy but fruitful, full of learning and new experiences. I'm very happy that the times to come, actually the next 3-4 months will be full of Neuroscience! First, today starts the HarvardX course "MCB80x: The electrical properties of the neuron". Next, in Jan. 04 2014, "Drugs and the Brain" by California Institute of Technology, at Coursera. Finally, in Jan. 6 2014, there is the "Medical Neuroscience" by Duke University, again at Coursera. And last but not least, "Computational Neuroscience", Jan. 10, by University of Washington, at Coursera. Wow!! See you!

It's not always feasible to study the human brain in order to address the issues of organization and function of human nervous system as well as the pathological bases of neurological and psychiatric diseases. So neuroscientists have informally adopted a set of "model organisms" based on their ability to do genetic analyses on systems that exhibit many biological similarities to the human one. These organisms are:

Ok, I'm so happy that my book order from Amazon.UK finally arrived! These are some excellent, top-quality editions, especially the three books to the right. Now, it's about time I make a plan (and stick to it) about the study schedule.

1. Do dendrites (the input part of a neuron) resemble to physical trees or do physical trees resemble to dendrites? (in Greek, we use the word /dendro/ (the stress goes to "e") to mean "tree". So "dendritic" means "tree-like".)

2. Do "social neurons" are born and die, struggling to adapt to the hosting neural network environment in a darwinian-like manner or maybe we, us members of a society with the same adaptation requirements are an explicit and deterministic manifestation of our own nerve cells?

3. Does a neuron resemble to a modern CPU or may be the modern CPU is a deterministic, unavoidable manifestation and implementation of our own inherent computational structure?

4. Does a neuron cell resemble to an electrical circuit or may be the actual electrical circuits are nothing more than deterministic manifestations/inventions/discoveries of our own inherent structure? Do we actually invent ourselves?

5. Do we choose to dance to the beat or are we driven by the dancing performance of our... cochlea hair cells??

To summarize, what is happening with meta-neuroscientific descriptions, like "a dendrite is like a tree", "a neuron is like a CPU", etc?). What does this metalanguage describe?

Does it describe a linguistic metaphor? (A is like B?).

Does it just project a physical world property (neuron's circuitry) to an invented property of humankind? (neurons are like circuits?).

Or does it ring a bell about correlating the properties of our biological building blocks to invented artifacts or external entities of the outer-world?

Could it be that our environment and our understanding of it is just a super-imposed deterministic veto (or unavoidable manifestation) of our elemental biological construction units?

Is it possible that implicitly and subconsciously, our brain dictates (decides by itself, autonomously from our conscious states) not only how to behave but actually to unavoidably make us behave in a way that will shape/create an external world similar to its structure?

Do we humans tend to create/replicate/invent/understand better those structures that are similar/familiar to the biology/chemistry of the cells of our brain? (roots, branches, paths, "networks"?).

Is there any amount of cognitive economy in this in order to be evolutionary preferred?

Is there even any wattage efficiency?

Is there any reason behind all this or is it just a strange coincidence?

"You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules" - Francis Crick, Nobel Laureate, 1962 - "the father of DNA". This saying implies in many ways that we're a mechanistic, physical machine that generates beautiful (and terrible!) things. Indeed, looking inside the brain one will not find neither spirits nor "Ghosts" in this machine. He/she will find genes, ions, channels, neurons, axons, dendrites and spikes (aka... BOOMS! - Farewell to you as well Prof. Segev, we've had some great moments - Plz, tell Guy to hurry the next series of lectures!!). Click "Read More" to continue!

The main question now to ponder about is what does the brain do with its plasticity and changes that utilizes for understanding the world. So the concept of "computation" comes in play in particular cells, in particular dendrites, meaning the functional aspect of learning and plasticity in terms of using it to compute aspects of the world in order to behave appropriately. (click Read More to continue reading)